Tag Archives: Chicago

Cynical Kingdom: Chicago

21 Monday May 2018

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Review: Chicago, by David Mamet
HarperCollins, 2018. 338 pp. $27

“A romantic is just a cynic for whom, as yet, the nickel hasn’t dropped,” says one character to another. Both are newsmen from Chicago’s leading paper, philosophical drunks, and they may be excused their pessimism, for it’s 1925, when underworld gangs struggle for control of the city, and life seems cheap. But these facts are incidental, for this is Mamet land, where corruption pervades every interaction like poison, and the only question is who will succumb next.

The more interesting drunk in this peripatetic, loosely connected novel is Mike Hodge, decorated war veteran, who falls in love, hard, with Annie Walsh. But a thug kills her at Mike’s apartment, for no reason he can figure, and when he’s drunk enough of his visceral grief away, he sets out to find the killer.

Before that happens, however, a lot of hooch flows under the bridge. Though I salute Mamet for letting his protagonist mourn, when so many mysteries take bereavement for granted and have the sleuth pounding the pavement right away, Chicago errs in the other direction. So many conversations take place between Mike and his cynical friends, chiefly his newsroom buddy, Parlow, and an African-American whorehouse madam, Peekaboo, that when they tell him they’ve heard enough about “the Irish girl,” you want to agree. The sleuthing doesn’t start until around page 150, and doesn’t really get going until much later. On their own, many of these scenes work beautifully, especially with Peekaboo, whose take on life and manner of expressing it make her a compelling character. Why, she asks rhetorically, do you think girls fall in love? Her answer is that the man can (choose one or more): “bring me off; buy me shit; protect me and my children; leave me a lot of money.” On hearing this, Mike chuckles dismissively.

But if you didn’t know that Mamet is a playwright, you’d quickly wonder why there’s so much talk, and why every sentence seems to have at least one word in italics, as if the author were giving his players line readings. The staginess doesn’t end there, either, because the narrative has plenty of closeted two- or -threesomes and very few panoramas. Surprisingly, Annie herself appears very little and has no dialogue, except reported as indirect discourse, and even her name seldom occurs: She’s the “Irish girl.” Is she meant to be merely an abstraction? A sex object? It’s a little strange. And do reporters of the city beat really use words like etiolated or debate whether a certain aphorism comes from Tacitus? Maybe these reporters do, since they seem preternaturally attuned and can intuit that someone they’ve just set eyes on carries a shameful secret, and what it must be.

That said, Chicago has its pleasures beyond the rich, colloquial dialogue. Mike’s detective work, once he throws himself into it, is clever, persistent, and courageous. The mystery offers plenty of twists despite having few moving parts. Mamet has a keen sense of the underworld, its codes, gestures, and ways of operation. And though he doesn’t reveal the Tribune newsroom in full — it seems a fairly quiet place, with little furniture, population, or obstacles to private, uninterrupted conversation — he knows old-time newsmen:

Crouch was the city editor, and, like most men dedicated to a cause, he took seriously the signs and trappings of his devotion. These, in his case, were an ancient rumpled suit, a green eyeshade while at work, a Fatima cigarette perennially held between his lips, his eyes screwed up against the smoke, nicotine-stained fingers and teeth, a dirty shirt, and frayed and inkstained cuffs. He was small, usually unshaven, and had looked every day of his fifty-eight years since his accession to the desk in 1913.

But, in the end, Chicago doesn’t hang together as a novel, and I don’t think it would make much of a play, either. I’d hoped for better from a writer I admire.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this post was published in shorter, different form.

Scarred Lives: The Jazz Palace

04 Monday May 2015

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Review: The Jazz Palace, by Mary Morris
Doubleday, 2015. 245 pp. $26
It’s 1915, and Chicago’s South Side has its clubs where black musicians assume that the very few white patrons must be there to steal their secrets. But that’s not why young Benny Lehrman hangs around, using the money intended for his piano teacher to bribe his way past the door. Jazz, whose name Benny doesn’t even know at first, reaches him because it says everything the tongue-tied, soulful teenager can’t put into words.

Jazz speaks of loneliness bred in the bone, of having to drag yourself to a job you hate, of desire for the kindness, attention, and sympathy he can never have and believes he doesn’t deserve. Underlying his pain is a family tragedy: Several years before, his younger brother, the family favorite, died in a blizzard. Ever since, Benny has unfairly taken the blame.

However, the novel opens on a different catastrophe. Three of Pearl Chimbrova’s brothers die when the S.S. Eastland rolls over and sinks just after leaving the dock. Benny, who happens to be watching from the same footbridge as Pearl, dives into the water and tries to help, but the bodies he pulls out are already dead. Even without reading the jacket flap, you know Pearl and Benny will meet again.

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Pearl’s mother never recovers, leaving her eldest daughter to pick up the pieces. As the years pass, Pearl takes over more and more responsibility for running the family saloon and mothering her younger sisters. Like Benny, she believes that she doesn’t deserve care or attention. Only routine keeps her going.

For Benny, it’s music, as he pursues learning jazz with a single-mindedness and energy he has never shown toward anything else. When he hears Napoleon Hill on trumpet, he knows why:

Everything he’d ever known about the world–that gravity holds you down and mothers are there when you get home, that baseball has nine innings, and sleep awaits you at the end of the day–was turned upside down. He forgot about his brother lost in the snow and the dead girl he’d danced with when the Eastland went down. . . . He even forgot he was a person in a crowd, not a very old person at that, just a boy. His arms and legs all melted into one. He wasn’t anywhere but inside the music he was hearing.

Napoleon and Benny, African-American and Jew, become close friends and musical partners, drawn together in part by vulnerability. With the advent of Prohibition, Pearl’s saloon has turned into a speakeasy, and Napoleon plays there from time to time, a great risk for a black man to take in a white neighborhood. Naturally, Benny sits in one night, but if you think you know the rest, you’ll have to read this book to see why Morris is too good a novelist to take the low road.

The Chimbrovas, the Lehrmans, Napoleon, every character in this book, even Al Capone, has been emotionally (if not physically) scarred. In this world of pain, in which warm currents drift through–sometimes within reach, sometimes not–there are no answers, only doing what you have to. But there are dreams, for those who dare, whether it’s just to be able to keep going, or to reach for something that might, one day, feel like happiness.

As I’ve said recently, I generally dislike novels about crossed paths, but The Jazz Palace nails it. I could explain that by saying that Morris opens up her characters’ inner lives, gets beneath their skins, and writes lyrically in the bargain. But it’s also that these people, like their creator, know they can’t afford cheap sentiment, and that whatever they want must be earned.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A City Burned

26 Monday Jan 2015

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Review: Shall We Not Revenge, by D. M. Pirrone
Allium, 2014. 323 pp. $17

For most Chicagoans, the winter of 1872 means untold hardship. The Great Fire has ravaged the city, destroying thousands of homes and workplaces, and the shantytowns that spring up to house the destitute and jobless offer no comforts or hope. People do what they must to stay warm in bitter cold, make it through another day, and keep their families together. Relief is paltry and slow, but criminals may be found everywhere. Gang bosses know where there’s money to be made, often thanks to corrupt police, who look the other way for a cut of the take.

Chicagoans of all classes flee from the Great Fire. From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 28 October 1871. (Courtesy Chicago Historical Society)

Chicagoans of all classes flee from the Great Fire. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 28 October 1871. (Courtesy Chicago Historical Society)

It’s in this brutal, gritty atmosphere that someone has killed a rabbi in his synagogue, bashing in his head with one silver menorah and stealing another. Was the motive robbery? The rabbi was much loved in his struggling neighborhood for good works, so it’s unlikely that anyone held a grudge. Yet he was also engaged in secret activities that no one wishes to talk about.

Newly appointed detective Frank Hanley must solve the case, and he faces long odds. Even beyond the native distrust city residents have for Chicago’s finest or the immigrant population’s belief that police are oppressors, to the Jews mourning their beloved leader, Hanley’s an outsider, an Irish Catholic who couldn’t possibly understand their ways or respect them.

From this premise, Pirrone (a pseudonym) crafts an engrossing story that keeps twisting this way and that until the very end. It includes a growing attraction between Hanley and Rivka Kelmansky, the late rabbi’s daughter, who helps him gather clues and navigate the cultural shoals that threaten to swamp the investigation at every turn. I like how the author frames Jewish rituals and customs from Hanley’s perspective, and how his misperceptions of them sometimes lead him to the wrong conclusions. I also like how she describes the city, the poor, modern police procedure in its infant days, and the underworld that so often evades justice. The sense of time and place is so strong that it almost carries the narrative by itself.

 

He sighed and trudged down the sidewalk. The cold kept the planks from sinking into the frozen mud beneath and dampened the pervasive odors of moist lumber and rotting vegetables. The light was thin and gray, like the remnants of snow on the ground, and flurries swirled in the air. Not enough to cover the dirty snow-crust and muck, unfortunately. . . . He loathed winter . . . [e]specially now, with the city’s scorched bones still bared to the sky and the taste of smoke in the air.

What I disliked was how the author writes her characters. With few exceptions, they’re either all good or rotten to the core. Hanley in particular feels too good to be true, not least his rapid recovery from severe injuries. He’s always on the right side, without prejudices, a good boy who even washes the dinner dishes and treats all women with respect. His only flaw is a bad temper, but what o’ that? Likewise, his immediate boss has unshakable trust in Frank–a neophyte–which leads to interventions that feel contrived, at times. More nuanced portrayals would have given Pirrone even more tension than she achieves.

Her prose, vivid though it is in description, falters at emotional moments. Too often, the narrative tells what the characters feel, sometimes even to repeat what they’ve already shown.

That said, I enjoyed Shall We Not Revenge for the story and the setting, a historical background that I’d never read about.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.